Will Bed Bugs Stay In One Room
For such small critters whose life is mostly sedentary, it is amazing how bed bugs are quite fast. Even if they don’t work out, they are as fast as Usain Bolt if you consider the size of their body versus the distance they can cover. This is why if bed bugs live in one room in your house, they can spread to other rooms sooner and later.
How quickly do these bed bugs spread from room to room? It will depend on whether they go there using the power of their own feet or if they hitchhike. These tiny creatures can move at a notable speed of 20 feet in 5 minutes. This is the reason why you should pay attention to every single room if you want to kill bed bugs once and for all.
Bed Bugs and How Fast They Spread Around Rooms
Bed bugs lay around 1 to 12 eggs per day and about 200 to 500 eggs in one lifetime. These numbers are enough to tell you how long it will take to have a bed bug infestation. It doesn’t really take a long time for the problem to blow out of proportion so you will be much better off if you contact a pest control company for treatment and inspection as soon as you can.
Bed bugs rely on meals from their warm-blooded hosts, normally humans, for them to survive. They also hide near their food sources until they feed again. How fast bed bugs move from one room to another partly depends on the length of time before an infested piece of clothing, furniture, luggage, or other items is moved from one room to the next. Bed bugs also move around the house looking for other hosts. Under favourable conditions, they can continue breeding no matter where the item is moved.
How Bed Bugs Disperse from One Room to Another
Bed bugs are quite flat and small, making it easy for them to crawl between voids in electrical sockets, walls, and other cracks and crevices. If you sleep in a different room, these bugs can find you through the carbon dioxide you emit while sleeping. They can get to you through hallways, walls, and other possible ways.
Bed bugs can also climb walls to reach their food sources. There are three primary factors why bed bugs end up spreading from one room to another.
- You started to sleep in another room hoping to fool the bugs and run away from them.
- You were too anxious about bed bugs biting you that you tried to move around and shift most of your stuff.
- You placed several bed bug bombs in the room to solve the issue even before it started.
All these mistakes only increase the chance of spreading home bed bugs in different rooms of the house.
Can You Contain Bed Bugs in One Room?
It is natural to start cleaning right away once you identified an infestation. This process can take some time. You need to inspect the room carefully. The process takes some time so you might feel tempted to try isolating these bugs in a room, monitoring them and observing how long it will take before they die.
Sadly, it takes an exceptionally long time before bed bugs starve. Therefore, isolation is not an effective way to deal with an infestation. Aside from that, it is virtually impossible to isolate one room from other parts of the house if no action is taken.
This is because of several reasons:
- Bed bugs can easily crawl through walls and pipes in an attempt to find food. Cracks in ceiling and floors are also perfect for them.
- Your pets carrying bed bugs will be more than happy to get inside the room unless the door is always shut
- You will take the bugs with you if there are bugs or they lay eggs on your belongings or clothes that are brought out of the room
- It is quite inconvenient to quarantine one room, such as the living room. It is much better to deal with the issue straight on
Bed bugs find you attractive for many reasons that it is almost impossible to guarantee that they won’t get near you. You can lock your door and dispose of the key but they will still find you just to get their blood meal.
You need to address the problem instead of letting it worsen or else, bed bugs will find you faster than what you might think.
BedBugSOS.ca recommendations
You want to start by cleaning your bedroom. You don’t want to leave your bedroom with a bunch of clutter around the room for bed bugs to hide. Be careful not to transport anything out of your room unless it’s in a plastic bag or dissolvable laundry bag that goes directly in the laundry machine.
In the second step, you want to make sure you vacuum all the cracks and crevices in the bedroom, your bed frame, bedside table and your mattress and boxspring. You’ll also want to make sure your mattresses and box spring have bed bug proof encasements. This is a must.
Apply Diatomaceous Earth
Now that you are done cleaning your room and vacuuming, you want to prevent bed bugs from spreading to other rooms.
To start, you want to apply diatomaceous earth at the perimeter of the bedroom. This prevents bed bugs from traveling from room to room through the baseboards
Now the only exit point would be the bedroom door, which is why we would recommend that you include interceptors at the end of the line of the diatomaceous earth. If bedbugs decide to exit or enter the bedroom, those interceptors will be there to intercept them before they escape the room.
If you don’t want to put diatomaceous earth across the doorway (which is understandable), consider this; If your bedroom is 12x12, the total perimeter is 48 ft. If a doorway is 3 ft wide, there is an 6.25% chance the bed bug travels through the doorway. You have just prevented 93.75% chances of bed bugs from travelling to another room.
See more bed bug diatomaceous earth here
Use bed bug interceptors
Once you’ve applied the diatomaceous earth At the perimeter of the room, we highly recommend you use bedbug interceptors. Bed bug interceptors are essential tools in early bed bug detection and should be used whenever Bedbugs are suspected.
Generally, bed bug interceptors are used under the legs of the bed, and we highly recommend that you place bedbug interceptors under each leg of the bed for early detection if possible. Some beds have bigger legs than others which is why we sell various sizes of interceptors. However some beds cannot accommodate interceptors.
If your bed cannot accommodate bedbug interceptors, you can still use them around the bed to detect bedbugs’ early presence. Studies from the University of Tennessee have shown that interceptors can be used as detecting devices on their own and remain effective without being placed under the legs of a bed.
So now that you’ve prevented bedbugs from spreading into other rooms, the only risk now is the people potentially carrying them out of the bedroom. So let’s say you wake up in the morning in your pajamas. You don’t know if eggs were potentially laid on your pajamas or you’ve caught some eggs on your way out of the bed, or there’s a bedbug that latched on to your pajamas…? That’s when the risk of bed bugs escaping the bedroom also increases. So what we recommend is that you always keep your pajamas in your bedroom and get dressed in bed bug free clothes before you leave the bedroom. Put all your clothes in a properly sealed bag ready for the laundry machine.
Along the same lines, you don’t want to go lay down in your bed with your regular clothes that you’re using to do chores around the house or you use for work, you really want to make sure you go into bed with only what you wear to go to bed. You don’t want to lay down in the bed in the afternoon with the clothes that you are using to also go watch TV in the living room.
Now the solution we gave you are the basics for preventing bedbugs and traveling from one room to another. You can apply the same concept to all the other rooms in your house. This is not a solution that guarantees complete bed bug extermination, this is why you need to be very meticulous in every step you take along the way. That means keeping your bedroom clean, vacuuming regularly and inspecting the monitors.
Remember that most bedbug cases are mild cases, and for the most part can be dealt with on your own and do not require the help of an exterminator. If you are worried that bedbugs will spread from one room to the next. We also recommend that you use active or passive detectors throughout your house.
Hope this helps and let us know if you have questions.
